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The owner of a Portland food cart has been accused of using racist slurs against a customer, less than two years after he was arrested for assaulting and slurring another customer.
As first reported by The Oregonian, a woman named Darline Hill says that on Feb. 6, she attempted to order lunch at Small Pharaoh's, a downtown falafel cart located at Southwest Stark Street and Fifth Avenue.
When she asked for a salad with chicken and rice with feta cheese, the cart's owner, Islam El Masry, took her credit card, then said he didn't have time for a special order and instructed Hill to go somewhere else.
When Hill, who is black, questioned El Masry about why he took her credit card if he did not intend to run it, he allegedly called her a racist slur. When she confronted him about the slur, he used it again. Hill told The Oregonian she then threw a Gatorade bottle at El Masry out of frustration.
According to Hill, the incident was witnessed several bystanders who asked El Masry to stop using the slurs.
El Masry has filed a police report against Hill. The Portland Police Bureau told The Oregonian that the report did not mention a bottle of Gatorade being thrown.
Hill says she has reported El Masry to the Better Business Bureau, and intends to file a complaint with the state Bureau of Labor and Industries.
In 2018, El Masry was arrested after an eyewitness filmed another altercation, in which he called a customer racial slurs, threw a bottle of Gatorade at her and sprayed her with Sriracha.
The victim, Carlotta Washington, who is also a black woman, agreed to settle out of court with El Masry and drop the charges.
After his arrest, El Masry admitted to verbally assaulting Washington in a series of lengthy, now-deleted YouTube videos.